[Sca-cooks] Once again, from today's New York Times (Lutefisk--long)

[Phil Troy/ G. Tacitus Adamantius]

And Happy Holiday to All! And to all, a good lutefisk!

>December 25, 2002
>
>Some Want Eggnog; Others, Lye-Cured Cod
>By BLAINE HARDEN
>
>INNEAPOLIS, Dec. 24 ‹ Allen Vevang, an undertaker of Norwegian
>ancestry, does not like to lunch alone, especially during the
>holidays.
>
>If Charlotte, his wife of 30 years, would join him, he says, he
>would be filled with joy. But she refuses, as long as he insists on
>eating lutefisk.
>
>So it was in Christmas week that Mr. Vevang found his solitary way
>to Pearson's Restaurant, a Minneapolis institution that caters to
>the seasonal cravings of Scandinavian-Americans. His lunchtime plate
>was piled high with mashed potatoes, creamed squash and the
>translucent, lye-soaked cod that reliably causes his wife (of German
>descent) to eat elsewhere.
>
>"Some people say lutefisk has a very fishy taste and an unpleasant
>smell," said Mr. Vevang, 61, looking doleful as he chewed his
>gelatinous fish, which he had anointed, in the Norwegian way, with
>copious amounts of melted butter. "To me, it tastes like Christmas.
>My present to myself is to come to this restaurant and eat it, even
>if I have to be alone."
>
>All along the lutefisk zone ‹ a vast swath of the United States
>stretching from Chicago to Seattle ‹ it is again the season to
>rejoice in and quarrel over a food that stinks up hundreds of
>Lutheran church basements and injects menu-planning torment into
>hundreds of thousands of mixed marriages.
>
>On one side of this tormented mix are Scandinavians like the
>undertaker who lunched alone. Their mothers raised them to believe
>in lutefisk (pronounced LOOT-uh-fisk) as the quivering embodiment of
>the holiday spirit. On the other is a restive horde of spouses,
>children and in-laws (a surprisingly large number of whom have
>Scandinavian blood). They never eat lutefisk, object raucously to
>its odor and rarely allow themselves to be mollified by the
>inevitable peace offering of Swedish meatballs.
>
>The familial tension notwithstanding, experts say that by New Year's
>Day, Americans will have cooked and eaten more than a million pounds
>of lutefisk.
>
>To locate the fish schism, one needs to look no farther than the
>restaurant that on Monday sated Mr. Vevang's hunger for tradition.
>
>"I serve it, but I won't eat it," said Carrie Cooney, the waitress
>at Pearson's who carried lunch to the funeral director.
>
>"My wife is Norwegian, but we got the rules straight when we were
>married ‹ NO LUTEFISK," said Larry Nelson, the manager at Pearson's.
>
>"I am not comfortable with the color and texture," said Maureen
>Pearson, wife of the restaurant's owner. Her husband declined to say
>if he ate lutefisk.
>
>"I refuse to comment on the grounds that it might be bad for
>business," Marston Pearson said.
>
>Mr. Pearson did say that the lutefisk trade had increased splendidly
>in his restaurant in recent years. The principal reason, he said, is
>the apparent reluctance of lutefisk eaters (and haters) to stink up
>their own kitchens. The odor of cooked lutefisk ‹ an enduring aroma
>that melds the rankness of overripe fish with the
>industrial-strength stench of a soap factory ‹ is something of an
>obsession in better homes throughout the lutefisk zone.
>
>In The Star Tribune of Minneapolis this month, a reader from Milaca,
>Minn., offered her favorite solution. It was AtmosKlear, a
>fragrance-free odor remover available at hardware stores. As
>interesting as the reader's cure was her description of how it saved
>the spirit of Christmas.
>
>"I was able to eliminate the smell of the lutefisk I prepare each
>year, while maintaining the vibrant odor of our fresh Christmas
>tree," the reader wrote. "Nobody smelled that terrible odor in my
>home ahead of time."
>
>All this carping about odor is disproportionate and unfair, said
>Roger Dorff, recently retired president of Olsen Fish, the company
>based in Minneapolis that processes about half the lutefisk eaten in
>North America.
>
>"You know, if I boil shrimp at home, it also smells," said Mr.
>Dorff, who this year handed the presidency of Olsen Fish to his son,
>Chris.
>
>Rather than talk about the smell, Mr. Dorff preferred to talk about
>tradition and purity in the processing of lutefisk. He explained
>that lutefisk literally means lye fish. It is a centuries-old
>Norwegian method of preserving the summer's catch, and it was widely
>practiced by poor Norwegians, many of whom ended up migrating to the
>United States.
>
>The fish is cod or lingcod caught in the North Sea. It used to be
>hung on racks in the sun, but now it is dried in kilns, which keeps
>birds from pecking at it and defecating on it. Once dried, cod
>becomes stockfish, a whitish or yellowish substance with the texture
>of leather and the rigidity of cardboard.
>
>Olsen Fish imports its stockfish from Norway and begins soaking it
>in September. It receives alternating baths of fresh water, lye
>water and fresh water. When it is rinsed of lye and rehydrated to
>plumpness, lutefisk is vacuum-packed for church suppers and
>Christmas dinners. (Lye leaves a distinctive ashy taste, which many
>people find offensive and which can cause heartburn.) The
>traditional way of preparing lutefisk is to boil it. But boiling it
>too long turns it to fish water, so many modern cooks steam it or
>bake it.
>
>About two-fifths of the lutefisk consumed in the United States and
>Canada, Mr. Dorff said, is put away at church suppers and gatherings
>of Scandinavian-dominated fraternal groups like the Sons of Norway.
>The rest is eaten at home. He said more lutefisk is eaten in the
>United States than in Norway.
>
>"The big eaters are the ones at the church suppers," Mr. Dorff
>explained. "They will eat a pound or two of it at a sitting and they
>often go to several church suppers during the lutefisk season, which
>begins in late September."
>
>But the big eaters, who tend to be Scandinavian men on the far side
>of 60, are disappearing.
>
>"When an old guy dies, then you lose 8 to 10 pounds of lutefisk
>consumption per year," said Mr. Dorff, who is 64. "Younger people
>are not as interested and they certainly don't eat that much
>lutefisk, although we are attempting to appeal to them."
>
>That attempt includes hot, buttery lutefisk giveaways at summer
>gatherings of young people in Minnesota and Wisconsin, which are the
>premier lutefisk states. The others in the lutefisk zone are the
>Dakotas, Illinois, Iowa, Montana and Washington.
>
>There is also the lutefisk TV dinner, a marketing ploy by Mike Field
>of Mike's Fish in Glenwood, Minn., and imitated by Olsen Fish.
>
>Believing that there are a substantial number of Norwegians who
>would eat lutefisk year-round, Mr. Dorff made a sizable wager on TV
>dinners four years ago.
>
>Olsen Fish bought 1,500 cases of microwave-safe plastic packs, each
>containing 12 segmented dinner plates. His employees filled a few
>hundred of them with mashed potatoes, peas and six ounces of
>lutefisk. The frozen vacuum-sealed dinners were distributed to
>selected supermarkets in Minnesota, where, for the most part, they
>did not sell.
>
>"Each year, it has gone down, down, down," Mr. Dorff said, speaking
>of the TV dinner sales.
>
>That is not the case, though, with the overall lutefisk market.
>
>"It is holding steady at about a million pounds a year," Mr. Dorff
>said. "And if it snows early in the season, sales pick up. People
>like to eat lutefisk when there is snow on the ground."
>
>There has been little of it on the ground in Minneapolis this
>Christmas season. But Mr. Vevang refuses to let meteorological
>happenstance affect his appetite.
>
>Counting lunch this week, he has come to Pearson's for three
>solitary holiday meals of lutefisk.
>
>In his own kitchen, though, he finds it too sad to cook the stuff.
>
>"I bought a pound a year ago and took it home," he said. "I ate that
>lutefisk by myself. My wife was sitting at the same table, and she
>refused to even have a bite."
>
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